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thought that even though he had no friends in the world someone might offer him a little kindness on his way out of it.”
    Her intensity was irresistible, and Mark recognized the hopelessness of getting rid of the box that night. “As long as it’s gone tomorrow,” he said. A few amenities, and the conversation ended. Mark sat in his chair staring angrily at the coffin. He had come home worried about his health. And found a coffin to greet him when he came. Well, at least it explained why poor MaryJo
had been so upset. He heard the children quarreling upstairs. Well, let MaryJo handle it. Their problems would take her mind off this box, anyway.
    And so he sat and stared at the coffin for two hours, and had no dinner, and did not particularly notice when MaryJo came downstairs and took the burnt potatoes out of the pressure cooker and threw the entire dinner away and lay down on the sofa in the living room and wept. He watched the patterns of the grain of the coffin, as subtle as flames, winding along the wood. He remembered having taken naps at the age of five in a makeshift bedroom behind a plywood partition in his parents’ small home. The wood grain there had been his way of passing the empty sleepless hours. In those days he had been able to see shapes: clouds and faces and battles and monsters. But on the coffin, the wood grain looked more complex and yet far more simple. A road map leading upward to the lid. An engineering drawing describing the decomposition of the body. A graph at the foot of the patient’s bed, saying nothing to the patient but speaking death into the trained physician’s mind. Mark wondered, briefly, about the bishop, who was even now operating on someone who might very well end up in just such a box as this.
    And finally his eyes hurt and he looked at the clock and felt guilty about having spent so long closed off in his study on one of his few nights home early from the office. He meant to get up and find MaryJo and take her up to bed. But instead he got up and went to the coffin and ran his hands along the wood. It felt like glass, because the varnish was so thick and smooth. It was as if the living wood had to be kept away, protected from the touch of a hand. But the wood was not alive, was it? It was being put into the ground also to decompose. The varnish might keep it alive longer. He thought whimsically of what it would be like to varnish a
corpse, to preserve it. The Egyptians would have nothing on us then, he thought.
    â€œDon’t,” said a husky voice from the door. It was MaryJo, her eyes red-rimmed, her face looking slept in.
    â€œDon’t what?” Mark asked her. She didn’t answer, just glanced down at his hands. To his surprise, Mark noticed that his thumbs were under the lip of the coffin lid, as if to lift it.
    â€œI wasn’t going to open it,” he said.
    â€œCome upstairs,” MaryJo said.
    â€œAre the children asleep?”
    He had asked the question innocently, but her face was immediately twisted with pain and grief and anger.
    â€œChildren?” she asked. “What is this? And why tonight?”
    He leaned against the coffin in suprise. The wheeled table moved slightly.
    â€œWe don’t have any children,” she said.
    And Mark remembered with horror that she was right. On the second miscarriage, the doctor had tied her tubes because any further pregnancies would risk her life. There were no children, none at all, and it had devastated her for years; it was only through Mark’s great patience and utter dependability that she had been able to stay out of the hospital. Yet when he came home tonight—he tried to remember what he had heard when he came home. Surely he had heard the children running back and forth upstairs. Surely—
    â€œI haven’t been well,” he said.
    â€œIf it was a joke, it was sick.”
    â€œIt wasn’t a joke—it was—” But again he